Why do we use base 60 for time and base 10 for everything else. Why has no one decided to integrate it. - eviltoast

Thought of this in the shower this morning, if anyone has an answer I’d be very interested!

  • TechyShishy@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Furthermore, there’s something to be said for units that are “the right size” as it were. It’s hard to measure the distance from your house to the store in parsecs for example, unless you own 1:1 scale copy of the millennium falcon.

    A day cycle is a time unit that has been thrust upon us by physics and biology, and we have to then split it into useful segments, and base 10 honestly does a poor job of that. You end up having to describe most things as 0.5 decimal minutes or 2 decimal minutes depending upon how you want to round them, since very few things actual sit close to the amount of time described by 1 decimal minute.

    Whether that’s because our culture thinks in “minutes” or not is debatable, but the point is that trying to move to such a system is nearly impossible, at least at the moment.